The most recent 20 comments posted to Making Light by gramina:

Summer, old churches, camp

I remember the Chapel of the Transfiguration at Camp Mitchell -- sweeping the leaves out before a service, taking the kneelers out of the bin, smelling the dust of them, and the cool smell of rain on the way -- watching the great vultures circle out over the cliff-edge behind the altar -- and silence, and peace, and an utter absence of division: us and the chapel and the wind and the stone and the earth and the trees and the weeds and the cliff and the birds and the wholeness, all one.

Off topic, but --

Xopher at 469: "I myself have the following sensitivity: I cannot sit with my back to the door of a restaurant. [...]Yet there are some people who insist that there's nothing wrong with sitting with my back to the door, and that they're not going to let me be so silly, and claim all the seats not with their backs to the door to "teach me a lesson" or some other "for your own good" kind of bullshit.

I have eaten with them once each. They are not among my friends."

*croggled*

I would be strongly tempted to move to a different table. Possibly in a different restaurant. That is Just Not OK. It's not ok to be patronizing, it's not ok to be manipulative, it's not ok to be dismissive, and it's not ok to be disrespectful.

...Come to think of it, given that list, perhaps it's not as off-topic as all that.

It looks like you're turning 49 -- I assumed at first that whoever was posting must be turning 81!

So here's hoping that this is the *next* to last prime^2 birthday, or possibly (as said above) even the third-to-last.

And, of course, here's also wishing you a wonderful year! As my dad said, if you can get to 50 without growing up, *you don't have to!* :)

Born in 04/62, and my first datable memory is from when I was about one and a half -- but it's a weird, isolated memory-picture of seeing a horse following a coffin down the aisle of a church, on television(1); it's associated with an emotive framework of profound grief extending out to either side of the actual memory. I suspect the reason I can remember it is that -- well, as mother described it when I asked her what the heck she thought that might be a memory of, she started crying, I started crying, the dog started crying --- that kind of thing apparently sort of cements memory.

((1) not the assassination, of course: the funeral.)

Other than that, I have dim memories of the Democratic National Convention in Chicago in 1968 (when I would have been roughly 6), clearer ones of mother going to a sit-in at the University of Wisconsin despite having walking pneumonia (did you know pepper gas is not good for walking pneumonia??) and of the Eugene McCarthy and George McGovern campaigns, and of course *quite* clear memories of Watergate.

(I also remember shocking my parents because, when I saw a flag at half-staff sometime in the late '60s, my question was "Who got shot?")

*wry grin* Do you get the impression I come by my politics honestly?

Oh my -- not only is the Kitschmas article wonderful in a truly appalling way, but I had never seen this article from Ship of Fools either, and it's wonderful. So thank you for leading me to a link that led me to it!

And Diane Duane's Door books -- I think Door into Fire first came out in the seventies, Door into Shadow in the eighties, Door into Sunset in the nineties, and I'm hoping for Door into Starlight sometime in the next couple years. ;>

That'd make a, what, quadralogy? over the course of roughly thirty-to-forty years.

Patience....

It reads like a translation of a poem in one fictional language into what would almost have to be another fictional language. And yes, the poem I'm thinking of would indeed be a help in dark places - !

Comment statistics for gramina on the Making Light blog

Total: 7 comments. View all these comments on a single page.